Hundreds of Jordanians protest outside Israeli embassy in Amman

July 28, 2017 9:57 P.M. (Updated: July 29, 2017 4:28 P.M.)

AMMAN (Ma’an) -- Hundreds of Jordanians participated in a march in front of the Israeli embassy in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Friday in order to demand its closure and cancel an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty in protest of an Israeli embassy guard who shot dead two Jordanian civilians last week.

The march was launched following Friday prayers and headed towards the Israeli embassy where protesters, holding Palestinian and Jordanian flags, shouted slogans calling for cancelling the “Wadi Araba treaty” signed in 1994 to support cooperation between the two countries.

Staff members of the Israeli embassy to Jordan, including a security guard referred to only as Ziv -- who killed Jordanian citizens Muhammad Zakariya al-Jawawdeh, 17, and Bashar Hamarneh -- had returned to Israel on Monday night after a day of high tensions following the shooting incident.

Jordanian news sites reported that Jordan’s King Abdullah had criticized Netanyahu’s welcoming home of the guard as “a political showoff” saying “it is provocative and destabilizes security and encourages extremism in the region.”

Abdullah had also demanded that Israeli authorities prosecute the guard for the killings.

Israel, meanwhile, has refused to allow Jordanian authorities to question the injured Israeli security guard, citing his immunity under the Vienna Conventions -- a body of international law which Israel has been accused of regularly violating.